Go to any skilled nursing or senior living conference, and you’ll be greeted with a wide array of exciting new technologies with the potential for making residents’ and workers’ lives better.
On the flashier end, there’s full-size exoskeletons that can help seniors walk again, or virtual-reality games that help users re-learn how to swallow and perform other basic activities; on the more ordinary but still impressive side, there’s predictive software that can help practitioners prevent hospitalizations, and compliant videoconferencing programs that allow doctors to treat residents remotely.
Of course, faced with reimbursement pressures in a changing payment landscape, it’s easy for an operator to look at this nearly infinite array of tech options and say: That’s great, but how do I pay for it?